Teasing, Ironic, Age-Conscious & Data Heavy: Super Bowl Ads 2015

With the average cost of a 30-second commercial at a record high of $4.5 million and the largest TV audience yet predicted for this year’s game, the Super Bowl is still considered marketing’s biggest day.  So, what can we expect from this year’s crop of Super Bowl commercials?

The art of the tease

70 per cent of consumers will pay attention to who is advertising before the game, and 45 per cent will seek out the actual ads before kick-off. With numbers like these, brands such as Lexus, Dove and Bud Light have all released their Super Bowl commercials for online viewing days before the game itself. Mercedes even launched a pre-campaign to promote their campaign! Given the race-to-first-release, we predict some savvy marketers will go back to basics, keep their big spot under wraps and their powder dry for the big night.

#pleasewatchmyspot

The median age of the NFL viewer has increased significantly from 45.8 in 2006 to 48.4 in 2013 and the average audience between 18-49 declined by about 10.6 per cent over the last NFL four seasons. However, 57 per cent of last year’s Super Bowl ads contained hash tags and this number continues to increase, regardless of demographic fact. Will advertisers look to use social to appeal to a youthful Gen X vs. the younger Gen Y audience? Maybe LinkedIn will get their first Super Bowl shout out.

Heavy irony everywhere

All the hype around Super Bowl advertising and the extreme amount of money everyone knows advertisers are spending has led to the rise of the ‘self-aware’ Super Bowl ad. It’s the teaser for a trailer for an ad that doesn’t actually exist: Newcastle’s effort with Anna Kendrick is probably the best example but many others such as GoDaddy and Sodastream have caught on. Clever and culturally irreverent, at what point do we over-parody and jump the shark? Newcastle is already out with this year’s effort, and we await another joke inside the joke inside the joke.

Big data does the big game

Take 120 million viewers, tens of millions of social media mentions, and marketers’ increasing obsession with Big Data, and the fact half the ads had been pre-released anyway, we expect February 1st to be a day of data dominating the headlines, more than the creative. Salsa segmentation, social traffic, multiscreen mayhem, we predict this is the year that marketers will use big data tools to really dig deep into Super Bowl viewership to help set up the rest of their 2015 campaigns, and start to get ready for the big daddy: Super Bowl 50, next year in Santa Clara.

Caroline Krediet is Partner, Head of Strategy at Figluilo&Partners